What is money? A rabid free marketeer puts his foot in lots of notes

Worstall @ the Weekend Several of you have asked for the skinny on what money actually is. So, here's the full fat Worstall take on cold, hard cash.

Answer: It's a way of keeping score. Who has the right to call upon the resources of others in that same society? And that, other than a couple of footnotes which we'll deal with overleaf, is pretty much it.

It doesn't matter, at this level of understanding, whether money is a commodity itself, something representing or exchangeable into a commodity like the gold standard, or just those pieces of paper of the current fiat money. It's simply a way of recording who gets to ask for what.

The average hourly wage in the UK is £13 or so. If you've £13 you can get an hour of average labour devoted to you. If you've £1.3m then you can get 100,000 hours of that average labour and what it can produce.

And, other than those footnotes, that really is all there is to it.